Adpositions and Conjunctions

Adpositions and conjunctions are parts of speech that usually act as relational elements in sentences. Adpositions are often used to refer to participants, locations, and times in discourse. Conjunctions are often used to express relations between sentences and the underlying events they describe. The semantic types of relations that these categories cover can vary considerably and overlap to some degree.

Adpositions can cover spatial or temporal senses (e.g., over in “over the hill”; at in “at 5 p.m.”), but they can also have more abstract or metaphoric senses (e.g., under in “under the weather”). Conjunctions and their senses can cover coordinating or subordinating relations. Whereas and or other coordinating conjunctions can be used to coordinate various parts of speech (e.g., nouns: “Mario and Luigi”), while and ...